


Across oceans

by soliari



Category: My Girl (Drama)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-11
Updated: 2010-09-11
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:25:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliari/pseuds/soliari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Koharu and Masamune talk their way through winter, in pictures and words and laughter. Set during the New York gap~</p>
            </blockquote>





	Across oceans

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, yeah, like a billion years late on watching this one. whatever.

  
Nothing sticks quite like snow, Kazama Masamune decides, pulling his camera bag strap further over his shoulder and trudging out of the subway station. Immediately, he regrets it, wind cutting at his face and snowflakes sticking to the ends of his hair.

Then, his hands dig through his coat pocket for his disposable camera. He snaps ten, fifteen pictures, a woman and her tiny dog in a purse, a man playing a steel drum for change under an apartment awning, a pack of fashionable-looking teenagers, a couple (the girl looked unhappy, loaded down with her boyfriend's shopping bags). He shoves the camera back into the front pocket of his green plaid jacket.

When he finally stumbles back into his tiny apartment in Brooklyn that night, ignoring the shouting of the newly-married couple below him and the singing of the Broadway hopeful soaring across the fence and into his window, he swears to bring his umbrella the next time. Then again, he'd sworn that the last time, and the time before that. He hangs his keys, his coat, his bag, and locks his door securely against the night. He kicks off his shoes where he's sure to stumble over them in the dark the next morning, and drops his camera bag on the counter. Then he flops on the couch in order to write his daughter a letter.

_'Koharu-chan.'_ (they all start like that, ever since the first one when he hadn't been sure what to say)

_'How are you? I saw another woman with her tiny dog today. I even managed to get a picture this time~ It snowed last night, everything is white all of a sudden, and sometimes, around noon, it's hard to see anything. Has the weather in Shizuoka gotten any worse? Stay warm! I was complimented on my English today, I might be able to do a shoot with a few of the models soon. Wouldn't that be exciting? My camera is almost full, so keep an eye out for a package, all right?_

_I love you._

_Masamune.'_

It's hardly fine literature, but it's not as if he only sends one letter a month, or anything (it's more like he sends a pack of them a week, but who can blame him for wanting to write to her? He can't call _all_ the time). He tucks the letter away with the others and blinks blearily at the ceiling. He's not tired any more. Too bad he doesn't understand most American television, he's never bothered to invest in one.

He breathes out, one long exhale that makes him sink into the couch like it's the most comfortable place in the world (never mind the ten or so bumps running staccato down his spine). He traces finger eights across the ceiling with his eyes half-open, and suddenly the fact that he has to be up in four--no, five, thank god--hours occurs to him. It is with a great sigh that he hauls himself off of the couch to his bed, stripping out of his layers of shirt and sweater and annoying jeans and into sweat pants, a t-shirt. He manages to get everything into the laundry basket, but it's a battle, as he stands in the hallway wanting nothing more than to strew everything across the floor in a trail of clothes like armor, like barriers, like protection.

\-----

Koharu receives the letters, then the package, two weeks later, eager hands and eager eyes bright as she tears open the cardboard box and puts the camera aside to be developed and tucked away into her photo album. She reads his letters with a grin that gets wider and wider as she nears the end of his week, and her fingers trace his messy, linked hiragana with fondness.

It isn't often she writes back, unless she's sending him a camera in return, simply because she doesn't know what to say, what to leave out, what words were important enough to send across ocean and land and live forever in Masamune's lockbox like all of his pictures or her mother's letters. Instead, she waits up all night on Saturday and calls him as he gets off from work, spilling her days into his ear as he chuckles and cautions her against colds and boys and forgetting her kindness. Some days, he sounds tired, gravelly-voiced and slow to respond at first, and she sometimes thinks about telling him to hang up and go to bed, but usually he hauls himself out of melancholy because this is almost as important as dinners with the boss and magazine shoots with attractive models whose invitations out he turns down with flustered, accented English and a handwave toward the purikura picture of his daughter on his nametag.

She's finished up her own camera, she realizes, as she snaps a final few pictures of a cicada creaking at her in the evening, and she smiles.

\----

Masamune actually develops the photos from Koharu at work; he has enough money to pay his rent and take the subway and pay the bills, but not much more than that. He prods at the photo paper and waves farewell to his well-dressed, well-spoken co-workers, and sits to wait.

The photos are, of course, juvenile, but Koharu is six years old and Masamune cherishes each shot. He smiles at a series of photos of a pond (Koharu apparently hadn't realized the effect was lost when one's reflection could be seen on the surface of the water) and actually laughs when he sees a photo she'd taken of one of her tiny female classmates beating up some of the boys. The photos are full of color and joy and life and _Koharu_, and it almost makes him re-think his recent black-and-white kick. Almost, anyway.

He has to wait for the photos to dry, and as he does he flips through the photo album Koharu had made for him when she'd decided to take pictures to share her life with him. His smile is a little watery, he imagines, but at least no one is around to take pictures of him (this time!).

\----

Koharu's response to his pictures is predictable; 'wow!' and 'so pretty~' and 'be careful of those gangsters, Masamune-kun,', and she has a fit of laughter over the woman with her useless-looking dog tucked into her wide pink purse. Masamune joins her in the amusement, and swears solemnly to himself find as many as he can, because that was laughter he wants to hear as much as he can. That was the laughter of the sun in his sky.

\----

Koharu receives two cameras in the next month; one full of people, like the pretty dark-haired Broadway-star-wannabe who lived next door through her window and the newlyweds downstairs with their baby and the elderly couple who own the building and spend all of their time arguing or going to Mets games, and one full of tiny dogs in purses. She laughs herself sick over them, thinking of Masamune stalking well-dressed society ladies with a Kodak disposable and taking pictures of their _dogs_.


End file.
